The Monuments Men (36 page)

Walker Hancock thought of his beloved Saima, his bride now for more than a year, although they had spent only a few short weeks together as man and wife. Balfour’s death was a reminder of the danger of the mission; his time apart from her, he knew, could very well be more than a temporary respite than the long life of love and happiness he hoped for.

And Balfour’s death no doubt reinforced the loneliness of the job, the isolation from friends and companions even in the middle of a million-man army. It had been ten days since Ronald Balfour died, and this was the first time any of his fellow Monuments Men on the front had heard of it. Hancock had no assistant to travel with him. After all their time in separate fields of combat, he wondered if he would recognize Robert Posey or Walter “Hutch” Huchthausen were they to walk in the door. After the compressed events of war, where nine months seemed like nine years, they were simply names on reports to him. But always, when he needed him, in the flesh and blood, there was George Stout.

At least Hancock had excellent news for his boss, even as they shared their sorrow. He had found Weyres, Count Wolff-Metternich’s assistant, in Bad Godesberg, Germany. The man was a treasure trove of information, and Hancock wanted to know how to handle him. Stout, perhaps preoccupied himself with thoughts of Ronald Balfour, told him simply, “I don’t need to tell you what to do, Walker.”

By the next morning, Hancock was passing detailed information on art repositories to the advanced units of First Army. Within a few days, he had transmitted to frontline troops the location of 109 repositories east of the Rhine, doubling the number of known repositories in all of Germany.

A week later, on March 29, 1945, an American commander pushed straight through the fighting and pounded on the door of the
Bürgermeister
of Siegen. When the astonished mayor opened the door, the commander said simply, “Where are the paintings?”

CHAPTER 32

Treasure Map

Trier, Germany

March 20–29, 1945

B
y late March 1945, Captain Robert Posey and Private Lincoln Kirstein, the brilliantly mismatched Monuments Men for Patton’s U.S. Third Army, were rolling through the Saar Valley along the border between France and Germany. Around them, they could see the effects of the Nazi occupation in the fallow fields and rusted, broken factories. Meat, it was said, was so hard to find that rutabagas were now the dietary staple. The citizens, most of whom were sympathetic to the Western Allied cause, would offer assistance for a mere cigarette, which were so scarce that many people had calmed their cravings for years with the butts thrown down by prisoners of war being marched to prison camps deeper in German territory. It was a land impoverished by war, used by Third Army as a warehouse and supply area, but Kirstein saw the beauty: the rolling hills beginning to green as the snow melted, the lazy river valleys, the dark forests so reminiscent of Grimm’s fairy tales. The small farms seemed as old as the dirt, and the ancient town gates and towers reminded him of the fantastic realms lurking in the background of Albrecht Dürer’s engravings.

“One gets a chance now to observe the attitude of the German people toward us,” Robert Posey wrote his wife, Alice, after crossing the Moselle River into Germany itself:
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The advance is so fast that many towns are not badly damaged. In these, and even in the damaged ones, the people line the sidewalks to watch our convoys go by just as they did in Normandy. They of course are not cheering but one almost thinks it is simply because they are less emotional than the French. They all have a look of lively curiosity. The older men light up with admiration of our superb equipment manned by spirited, healthy soldiers. Children shout to us and the tiny girls smile brightly and wave. Though we are supposed to ignore them I am too soft hearted not to return those waves. Large crowds mill about and watch our engineers build a new wooden bridge alongside of one their own soldiers blew out a few days before so as to retard the inevitable destruction of their arms. Instead of the newly unfurled tricolor as in France, each house flies the white flag of unconditional surrender…. One old woman wiped a tear from her eye with the corner of her apron but the frail, bent, white haired creature was probably thinking of her own boy who may have been sacrificed for Hitler…. When our bull dozers push the long pole road blocks out of the ground the people watch until it is finished and then saw the logs up and split them into firewood. Bobby sox girls try to flirt a bit when they are sure no one is watching. It is not an altogether dismal picture but why do they fight.

On March 20, 1945, the Monuments Men arrived at the Third Army base in Trier, one of the most historic cities in northern Europe. “Trier stood one thousand three hundred years before Rome; may it continue to stand and enjoy eternal peace,” read a famous inscription on a house on the main market square. The founding date was a fabrication, but Trier indeed had been a garrison town even before the arrival of Roman legionnaires in the time of Augustus Caesar. Unfortunately, it had not fared as well in this war as the “smooth and conquered” Saar valley.
2

Posey, in a summary of Third Army’s progress, referred to Trier as “smashed.”
3
Kirstein suspected the city was in worse shape than at any time since the Middle Ages. “The desolation is frozen,” he wrote, “as if the moment of combustion was suddenly arrested, and the air had lost its power to hold atoms together and various centers of gravity had a dogfight for matter, and matter lost. For some unknown reason one intact bridge remained…. There was only enough room for one way routing as everything had fallen into the street. The town was practically empty. Out of 90,000, about 2,000 were there, living in a system of wine-cellars. They looked very chipper, women in slacks, men in regular working suits. The convention is to look right through them. Some of the houses have white sheets or pillow cases hanging out. Hardly a whole thing left. 15th century fragments of water spouts, baroque pediments and gothic turrets in superb disarray mixed up with new meat cutters, champagne bottles, travel posters, fresh purple and yellow crocusses and a lovely day, gas and decomposition, enamel signs and silver-gilt candelabra, and appalling, appalling shivered, subsided blank waste. Certainly Saint Lô was worse, but it didn’t have anything of importance. Here everything was early Christian, or roman or romanesque or marvelous baroque.”
4

The Nazis had poured money into restoring Trier, especially the Market Place, now mostly ruined, and the Simeonstrasse, known as the “Street of German History.” The façade of the Dom and connecting cloister and the surrounding district was heavily damaged. The baroque palace of the counts of Kessel was demolished. The home of Karl Marx, who was born in Trier in 1818, had been turned into a newspaper office by the Nazis. The Allies flattened it in an aerial bombardment.

And yet what remained was, in itself, a world-class collection of buildings. “The interior of the Dom was intact,” Kirstein wrote, “except that the bell fell through the tower, the Liebfrau[en]kirche was badly burnt, but standing, St. Paulinus, an absolute orgy of pink and blue rococo marvels, was only hit, because the idiot Nazis put tanks in a corner of the façade, the Porta Nigra [ancient Roman gate] untouched except where the idiots had put machine guns, the Matthias Abtei, intact except for the rifled sacristy.”
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The treasures of the Dom, including the “Seamless Cloak” said to have been stolen from the dying Christ by Roman soldiers, were found hidden in secret bunkers built into the city’s ancient stone foundations.

Posey and Kirstein immediately set out to educate the soldiers on the wonders of the city. Posey’s previous historical notes on Nancy and Metz had proven popular, so by the time Third Army reached Trier, he and Kirstein had compiled a treatise on the history and importance of the city and its buildings. They feared the troops, having crossed into enemy territory, would be less careful with historic monuments and more inclined to casual looting. By educating them about a grander, pre-Nazi German culture, the Monuments Men hoped to create interest and appreciation, which would translate into good behavior.

Not that they were above picking up a few souvenirs. Posey often sent small things home to Woogie—mostly cards and German coins. In Trier, he added an aluminum flagstaff ornament, telling Woogie the Nazi flag had been burned and that the staff “must have gone all through the war. The Germans have not had enough of this metal even for airplanes in the last three or four years.”
6

Posey and Kirstein knew the names of most of the town officials from their interviews in Metz and other cities, and they used this information to create a five-person board of experts to “salvage fragments, barricade damaged walls, make temporary repairs wherever possible, gather scattered documents, open secret passages… and advise upon necessary emergency care” under the direction of the Allied Military Government.
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Two days after Trier fell to Third Army, the board was at work. These officials, one of whom proved to be a Nazi Party member and was thus dismissed, in turn passed on information about German officials farther east. The model established in Trier—education coupled with local participation—would be used by the Monuments Men of Third Army for the rest of the campaign.

But by March 29, 1945, the last thing on Robert Posey’s mind was the next city farther east. By then, his one consuming thought was his toothache. Like many soldiers, he had been in pain for much of his tour of duty. He had injured his back at Normandy when a sergeant stepped on his hand as the troops went over the rigging into their landing craft, causing him to fall several feet onto a machine-gun turret. He had broken the arch of his foot in the Bulge. A Third Army officer had suggested a Purple Heart for that one, but Posey refused it. Purple Hearts were for troops wounded
by the enemy
in combat, not for soldiers who fell into snow-covered holes.

But neither injury was as painful as the toothache. Unfortunately, the nearest army dentist was a hundred miles away in France. He tried to work through it, but the constant pain was too much to ignore. Neither he nor Kirstein spoke German very well, so finally Kirstein stopped a little blond boy in the street—children were usually the best sources of information—and pantomimed a sore tooth. For three sticks of Pep-O-Mint gum, the boy grabbed Kirstein’s hand and directed him to a Gothic door a few blocks away, above which hung a sign in the shape of a tooth.

The dentist, an older man, spoke fine, heavily accented English and “gabbled more than a barber.”
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He seemed to know everyone in Trier, and he seemed as interested in the Monuments Men’s mission to save German culture as he was in fixing poor Posey’s impacted wisdom tooth.

“You might talk to my son-in-law,” he said, putting away his tools at the end of the procedure and wiping the blood from his hands. “He’s an art scholar, and he knows France. He was there during the occupation.” He paused. “But he lives miles from here, I’m afraid. I can only take you there if you have a car.”

The three men drove east out of the city. The roads were littered with ammo and artillery and some of the farmhouses still smoldered. The trees were green and half full of spring leaves, but the fields were bare and brown, the grapevines untended. They passed a child, grim-faced and still, staring at them as they passed. The dentist was in high spirits. “Wonderful,” he’d say when they entered each small town. “Wonderful. It feels like a lifetime since I left Trier.” He kept excusing himself to stop at a farmhouse to visit friends or a small store to buy supplies. “Wonderful,” he’d say, coming back with food in hand. “We haven’t had fresh milk in months.”

“Is this a good idea?” Kirstein asked Posey as the Monuments Men waited for the dentist outside an inn in another shattered village. They were twelve miles from Trier, and with each mile the surrounding hills seemed increasingly hostile. Every village looked abandoned, and the white pillowcases of surrender no longer flew from the houses.
Sudden vacancies
, Kirstein thought.
Nobody wants to be seen
.

“Probably not,” Posey said. But instead of saying anything else, he just stared out at the ridge that formed the end of the valley. His mouth felt like someone had taken a sledgehammer to it, but discomfort was part of the job. He was thinking instead of the thin line between doing that job and the essential interest in making it home for supper. What would Woogie do without a father?

The dentist approached, smiling, fresh vegetables in hand. “Wonderful,” he said. “Simply wonderful.”

“No more stops,” Posey said gruffly, running his tongue along his swollen gums. He suspected the dentist was a harmless fraud, but the more stops he made, and the more the end of the valley loomed, the more the whole excursion seemed like a trap.

Finally, at the base of the valley, the dentist told them to pull over. A large white-plastered house stood at the foot of a hill, a forest rising beyond it. “This way,” the dentist beckoned, walking behind the house. Halfway up the hill was a small building, an isolated weekend cottage perfect for an ambush of careless art experts. Posey and Kirstein looked at each other. How stupid was this? Even if the son-in-law was an art scholar, and even if he was alone in the house, what could he possibly know? Almost reluctantly, Posey started climbing the hill.

Inside, the cottage was bright and clean, an homage to France and to a life of beauty and intellect. The walls were lined with photographs of the Eiffel Tower, Notre Dame, Versailles, and other famous Parisian landmarks. A few vases were stuffed with flowers, probably picked from the surrounding hills. The bookshelves were filled with books on art and history, both common and obscure. It evoked, especially in Kirstein, the “agreeable atmosphere of a scholar’s cultivated life, domestic, concentrated, a long way from war.”
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This was the first owner-occupied private residence he had entered in Germany, and it made him feel at home.